Killing Rain aka One Last Kill

241 Pages·2016·1.13 MB·English

by  Eisler Barry

Annotation
No one but Japanese-American assassin John Rain can win the game of
cross and double cross he encounters in this new novel of sexy international
intrigue in the series.
Torn between his past as a soldier and his vocation as a killer, longing for
attachment but forced to operate alone, and haunted by the fear that one day
there must be a reckoning for the things he has done, John Rain moves like a
dark ghost through Tokyo and the other urban landscapes in which his Asian
features enable him to operate undetected. His ability to make death appear to
have been of “natural causes” keeps his reluctant services in constant demand.
In Killing Rain, Rain has a new employer, the Mossad – which needs an
operator who can remove “problems” in Asia – and a new partner: Dox, the ex-
marine sniper and party animal first introduced in Rain Storm. He also has a new
hope that by using his fearsome talents in the service of something good, he
might atone for all the lives he has already taken. But when Rain’s freshly
awakened conscience causes him to botch an assignment, turning what should
have been a surgical hit into a massacre, he finds himself running both from the
Mossad and from the CIA. Can he trust Delilah, the alluring Israeli agent whom
he once fought and then loved, to save him now?
Barry Eisler
PART ONE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
PART TWO
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
PART THREE
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Barry Eisler
Killing Rain aka One Last Kill
The fourth book in the John Rain series, 2005
For my love, Laura
The way of the samurai is found in death.
YAMAMOTO TSUNETOMO, Hagakure
PART ONE
ONE
KILLING ISN’T THE HARD PART. Gangbangers and other fear biters do
it every day. Anger pumps you up, panic cancels consideration, you grab the
gun, close your eyes, pull the trigger, Christ, an ape could do it, you don’t even
need to be a man.
No, the truth is, killing is the easy part. Getting close to the target, though,
that takes some talent. And making it look “natural,” which is my specialty,
well, I’ve known of only one other operator who could consistently get that
right, and I’m not sure he should count because I’m the one who killed him. And
leaving no trail back to yourself, that’s no cakewalk, either.
But the hardest part? The part that you can’t plan for, that you can really
understand only when it’s already too late? Living with it after. Bearing up under
the weight of what you’ve done. That’s the hardest. Even with limitations like
mine-no women, no children, no acts against non-principals-you’re not the same
person after. You never draw the same breath again, or dream the same dreams.
Trust me, I know.
As much as you can, you try to dehumanize the target. Accepting the target
as human, a man just like you, creates empathy. Empathy makes killing more
difficult and produces caustic regret.
So you employ euphemisms: in Vietnam we never killed people; we only
“wasted gooks” or “engaged the enemy,” the same as in all wars. When possible,
you prefer distance: air strikes are nice, bayonet range is horrible. You diffuse
responsibility: crew-served weapons, long chains of command, systematic
replacement of the soldier’s sense of self with an identification with the platoon
or regiment or other group. You obscure features: the hood is used not to
comfort the condemned, but to enable each member of the firing squad to pull
the trigger without an anguished face to remember afterward.
But it’s been a long time since any of these emotional stratagems has been
available to me. I typically operate alone, so there’s no group with whom to
share responsibility. I don’t discuss my work, so euphemisms would be
pointless. And what I do, I need to do from a very personal distance. By the time
I’m that close, it’s too late to try to cover the target’s face or otherwise conceal
his humanity.
All bad enough, even under the usual circumstances. But this time I was
watching the target enjoy a Sunday outing in Manila with his obviously adoring
Filipino family just before I killed him, and it was making things worse.
The target. See? Everyone does it. If I’m different than most, it’s only in
that I try to be more honest. “More” honest. A matter of degree.
Manheim Lavi was his name, “Manny” to his business associates. Manny
was an Israeli national, resident of South Africa, and citizen of the world, which
he traveled much of the year sharing bombmaking expertise with a network of
people who put the knowledge to increasingly grisly use. Vocations like
Manny’s once offered a reasonable risk-to-reward ratio, but post-9/11, if you
sold your expertise to the wrong people, you could lose your rewards pretty fast.
That was Manny’s story, as I was given to understand it, a tragic fall from a
certain government’s grace.
Manny had arrived in Manila from Johannesburg that evening. A black
Mercedes from the small Peninsula fleet had picked him up at Ninoy Aquino
Airport and whisked him straight to the hotel. Dox and I were already staying
there, outfitted with first-rate ersatz identities and the latest communication and
other gear, all courtesy of Israeli intelligence, my client of the moment. Dox, an
ex-Marine sniper and former comrade in arms of mine, had recently walked
away from a five-million-dollar payday to save my life in Hong Kong. Bringing
him in on this job was in part my way of trying to repay him for that.
Dox was waiting in the lobby when Manny arrived. I was in my room on
the sixth floor, a tiny, flesh-colored, Danish-designed wireless earpiece nestled
in my ear canal, a wireless mike secured to the underside of the left lapel of the
navy blazer I was wearing. Dox was similarly equipped.
“Okay, partner,” I heard him say softly in his southern twang, “our friend
just got here, him and the world’s biggest, butt-ugliest bodyguard. They’re
checking in right now.”
I nodded. It had been a while since I’d worked with a partner, and not so
long ago Dox had proven himself a damn good one.
“Good. Let’s see if you can get the name he’s using and a room number.”
“Roger that.”
Having to get this information on our own wasn’t ideal, but the Philippines
wasn’t exactly the Israelis’ backyard, and they hadn’t been able to offer all that
much. Manny traveled to Manila frequently from his nominal home in
Johannesburg, taking as many as ten trips in a year. He never stayed for less than
a week; the longest of these visits had lasted two months. He’d been doing this
for a decade: presumably because customs control in Manila isn’t as tight as it is
in, say, Singapore, making the Philippines a good place for meetings with the
MNLF, Abu Sayef, Jemaah Islamiah, and other violent groups in the region;
possibly because he liked the price and variety of Manila’s well-known nightlife,
as well. He always stayed at the Peninsula. There were a few surveillance
photos. That was all.
With less than the usual dossier to go on, I knew we would have to
improvise. Where to hit Manny, for one thing. The hotel was our only current
nexus and so presented a logical choice. But if Manny died in the hotel, it would
absolutely have to look natural; otherwise, there would be too much
investigative attention on the other guests, including Dox and me. Staying
elsewhere wouldn’t have helped; it would have kept us too far from the action.
The level of “naturalness” a hotel hit itself would require isn’t easy, but
there were other problems, as well. Most of the ruses I typically use to get into
someone’s room depend on the target’s anonymity, yet Manny was well known
to the hotel. And even if I did get into the room while Manny was out and then
waited for him to return, what if the bodyguard swept the room immediately
before his arrival? What if Manny came back with a bar girl? In the current
terrain, I couldn’t control for these variables, and I didn’t like that.
Still, I wanted the room number. Partly in case a better opportunity didn’t
present itself and we had to use the Hotel Room Expiration as Plan B; more
important, so we would know on which floor to place the video camera that we
would use to track his movements. We could have tried placing a camera in the
lobby, which would have been easier because it would have saved us the trouble
of finding out what floor he was on. But there were downsides to the lobby, too.
With all the people coming and going through the hotel entrance, we’d have to
scrutinize the grainy feed constantly to pick Manny out of the crowd. And if the
lobby was always our first chance to see him on the move, we’d have to
scramble to follow him out of the hotel-behavior that any decent bodyguard
would key on in a heartbeat. So I decided we would use the lobby only if we had
to.
Even low-end hotels don’t give out their guests’ room numbers, though,
and the regal Peninsula Manila, with its expansive, marble-lined lobby and
white-uniformed bellhops, was anything but low-end. And even if we found an
indiscreet employee, we wouldn’t have known who to ask for because we didn’t
know what name Manny would be staying under. So, while leaning forward to
ask some typical questions about Manila and environs, Dox had taken the liberty
of placing a few adhesive-backed transmitters under the long front edge of the
marble reception desk. When Manny checked in, Dox would be able to listen in
on his conversation with the clerk.
I waited two minutes, then heard the twang again. “Well, it’s good news
and bad news. Our friend is here under the name Mr. Hartman. But all the clerk
said to him is, ‘Mr. Hartman, your room number is written here.’ ”
I’d received the same treatment when I checked in and wasn’t surprised.
The hotel staff was well trained.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Sure, there’s something else,” I heard him say, and I could imagine his
trademark grin. “He took the elevator on the Ayala Tower side.”
The hotel had two separate wings-the Ayala and the Makati. Now we knew
which set of elevators to focus on. We were beginning to triangulate.
“You get on with him?” I asked.
“I tried to. But the bodyguard was awfully polite and insisted that I just
head on up by my lonesome.”
All right, his bodyguard had some tactical sense. Not a surprise. “Did he get
a good look at you?”
“Good enough. I think we can expect him to recognize the best-looking
fella in Manila next time he sees me.”
I nodded. Letting Dox run ahead was a calculated risk. Soon enough we
would be double-teaming Manny, and it would be hard for his bodyguard to
avoid getting distracted by sightings of Caucasian Dox, with his linebacker’s
physique and good ol’ boy’s grin. Distracted enough to completely overlook the
smaller, unassuming Asian guy Dox was working with.
There were about two hundred and sixty rooms on the Ayala side, and I
thought about calling each of them from the house phone, offering, “May we
have someone draw you a bath, Mr. Hartman?” until I hit the right room. But if
Manny knew the hotel’s routines, as presumably he did, or even if he was just
reasonably paranoid, a call like that could make him suspicious. He might phone
the front desk to confirm. Or he might just accept the offer, which would create
its own set of problems. Enormous, goateed Dox showing up to draw you a bath
isn’t everyone’s idea of proper hygiene.
So I’d hold off on Plan Bath, and use it only if our more subtle attempts
came to nothing. “Think you can get anything else?” I asked.
“You know I’m working on it. Give me five minutes.”
The next part of the plan was for Dox to make his way to the gift shop,
where he would buy a book or something and charge it to his room. The clerk
would check Dox’s name and room number against a list to ensure that the
transaction was legitimate. Dox would be holding a high-resolution camera
designed to look like an ordinary cell phone. Dox would position himself so that
he could use the camera to capture what was on the list, including the name
Hartman and an accompanying room number. We’d tested the system earlier,
and it had worked perfectly. Now that we had the right name, it was time to see
whether it would work when it counted.
Five minutes later there was a knock on my door. I padded quietly over and